TruthCon

As the sun sets in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, one unseasonably-sweltering May night (fucking climate change), Greerson cracks open his first—but certainly not the last—PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) of the night. He thought moving to a town that, decades earlier, had renamed itself after a then-popular but now totally-forgotten game show (that had aired on the fucking radio, even) would gain him cachet among his fellow hipnoids (as his cohort’s members currently and good-naturedly call themselves), the irony of his choosing to live there reaching what he considered stratospheric levels of intensity and cleverness. Plus compared to San Francisco, where he’d lived since barely graduating from that allegedly ultra-hippie liberal arts school in the Pacific Northwest two years earlier (since when do hippies care about fucking deadlines, man?), his new town offered dirt-cheap rents and (as far as he could determine) no tech-industry snots, especially those fuckers who looked down on him at burlesque clubs for using a smart phone more than a week old. However, after a week in TruthCon, he wanted to hang himself like his literary hero, DFW (David Foster Wallace) (though not necessarily before finally cracking open that copy of fucking Infinite Jest and reading at least a few pages, endnotes included). Never mind that everyone there worships the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief. How can any civilized young person live in a town without an Apple store, without industrial wastelands converted to farmland, without designer mesh coverings (made of organic hemp) for millennial beards? Greerson strokes his millennial beard, takes several swigs from his beer, and consigns himself to masturbating once again to his download of his current favorite retro-Nineties porn flick, Beverly Hills 9-Bros-Screw-1-Ho. But five minutes into the flick, his hand down his pants, he suddenly realizes how to—